The August 2015 global outage: locked out worldwide by 'routine internal maintenance'

On Sunday 30 August 2015, Dropbox went down globally, leaving users around the world unable to reach the cloud-storage service or their files. Reporting on the incident under the headline 'Dropbox DROPS BOX as service GOES TITSUP worldwide,' The Register quoted Dropbox's own status page: 'We have identified the cause, which was the result of an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance.' The company said it was working to fix the problem, without giving further technical detail.

The company's account and what its own customers were reporting did not fully match. As The Register put it at the time, "a quick scan of 'Dropbox down' tweets told a different story, with many customers moaning that they remained locked out" even as Dropbox worked the incident — a gap between the company's stated status and users' actual experience that the outage became known for. The outage was resolved later the same day.

Dropbox's status page today (status.dropbox.com/history) publishes a running history of incidents, but that live feed does not reach back to 2015 — the August 2015 outage no longer appears in it — so the only documented account of the incident is contemporaneous press coverage such as The Register's.